Student activist Malcolm Harris and friends made a stink in September when they discovered that the university allotted $5 million for student services consulting fees in the fiscal year 2009.
It remains to be seen how that money was actually spent, but Harris (who writes a column for The Diamondback) should be thankful he doesn’t attend University of North Carolina, the University of California – Berkeley, or Cornell University. The three universities have hired the consulting firm Bain & Company to help with painful budgets cuts, according to a story in The New York Times last week.
California spent $3 million on Bain, but the university’s chancellor, Robert J. Birgeneau, said he hopes the firm will save them much more.
“If we could save $30, $40, $50 million for an investment of $3 million, I’d be ecstatic,” Birgeneau said. “I’m a physicist, not an expert on organizational structures. But I believe we can be more efficient.”
Some of the potential savings Bain found for UNC include the revelation that more than half of the officials in management postions at the university have three or fewer people reporting directly to them.
Bain also reccomended reining in the more than 100 centers and institutes that have sprouted up aross the university, many with their own finance, information technology and human resources departments.
If the university follows all of Bain’s reccomendaitons, it will save $160 million.